Looters Still Ransacking in Afghanistan

"The means we have are not sufficient. We see worsening vandalism," said Humayum Tandar, Afghan ambassador to Belgium.

Verhaegen described a highly organized trade that uses complicated smuggling routes to avoid detection _ over the 3,500-foot Khyber Pass connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan, on to Lebanon, and then via the airport either in Brussels or Amsterdam to a final destination in Switzerland or the United States.

"The more transit points you have, the more difficult it is to retrace the origins," Verhaegen said. Certificates could be changed along the way to make the art appear legitimate.

Much has been made of an exhibit at Paris' Guimet Museum, where 22,000 pieces of jewel-encrusted crowns, golden daggers and baubles from an ancient burial mound are back on display after being hidden for years by Afghans at great personal risk.

Still missing, however, are more than 55,000 art objects that were stolen from all over the country since the 1980s, said Zemaryalai Tarzi, a prominent Afghan archaeologist.

"Never has a country been looted so systematically as Afghanistan," he said. "It was before the Taliban, it was during the Taliban, it was after. And it continues," he said.

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